Brand Value of Online Advertising: Drive Sales Online - and Off
By Rick Mathieson
Author, Branding Unbound
Let’s face it: Smart marketers aren’t wondering whether online advertising has brand value.
They’re marveling about how the brand value of online advertising is helping to drive sales – online and off.
Just ask Lenovo and Unilever.
Lenovo, of course, is the Chinese company that acquired IBM’s line of ThinkPad personal computers only to find itself with a daunting task: convincing US consumers that it’s okay to purchase a computer from a Chinese company.
To jumpstart the effort, the company launched an online ad campaign aimed at its target business-user audience through banners on the mobile Web sites of USA Today, CBS Sportsline, Go2 and others.
Special offers on the banners sent consumers to a mobile Web site where they could learn about Lenovo and it’s role as the maker of the ThinkPad brand. They could also elect to take a survey by entering a contest for a free cell phone upgrade.
Over a four-week period, the campaign consisted of one million advertising impressions. And according to industry reports, over 1,300 consumers filled out the survey.
The results: A 6.6% click-through rate, and a 188% increased in brand awareness among the target audience. Over the last year, the company has seen an 8% increase in sales in all its channels, online, retail and otherwise.
In other words, online advertising helped build brand, which has helped drive demand, which in turn, will help burnish the brand further.
Not that Lenovo has overcome all its challenges. Those impressive sales figures actually lagged nearly 1% behind the industry average last year. And that perception issue may prove insurmountable in the long term.
But the campaign, and efforts since, have illustrated the power of online advertising to help build a brand where none may have existed – and to give at least one tough business proposition a fighting chance.
Indeed, for all the talk of adding brand value to performance as online advertising’s primary metrics, even powerhouse brands began realizing long ago that the distinctions between these elements are sometimes meaningless.
Take Unilever’s Dove brand of beauty products.
Unless you’ve been living on another planet, you’ve no doubt experienced Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty,” what with its multiplatform ad campaign featuring images of real women with real curves (”un-Barbies,” if you will), who reflect a kind of natural, inner beauty that a catwalk full of Tyras, Naomis and Evangelistas could never hope to achieve.
As it happens, “Beauty” has been so successful that to call it a mere ad campaign would do it a gross injustice. It is more accurately described as a movement.
First, Dove marketers worked with researchers at Harvard University and the London School of Economics to conduct a 10-country study of more than 3,300 girls and women ages 15 to 64 in order to better understand women’s views of their own beauty.
The marketers used insights from this study to tap into a broader dynamic emerging within the zeitgeist: a growing desire for “authenticity.” Not the “truthiness” sort, mind you, but the “live-your-best-life” variety personified by brands like Real Simple magazine and Oprah Winfrey.
In a kind of perfect symbiosis, the resulting print, television, online, and outdoor ad campaign seamlessly hocked products like “Intensive Firming Cream” and “Exfoliating Body Wash” while encouraging women to express and define their own beauty without conforming to pop culture’s narrow definition of attractiveness.
Indeed, in many ways online components were the most powerful elements of the campaign – enabling consumers to vote on whether women in the ads were “fat,” or “fabulous,” “wrinkled” or “wonderful.”
Each of the components, in its own way, drove home and reinforced the brand message embodied by the centerpiece of the initiative, the “Campaign For Real Beauty” Web site, which features educational downloads for parents, teachers and teens on how to foster feelings of self worth and self acceptance, and where consumers can contributed to a Self Esteem fund that promotes healthy body image to girls and women worldwide.
Did the online component – any of these components – produce immediate conversions that would register on an online campaign performance dashboard? For competitive reasons, Unilever hasn’t released that kind of granular detail.
But cumulatively, the campaign’s branding emphasis has had an undeniable, incontrovertible impact on sales.
Following the launch of the initial “Campaign for Real Beauty,” market share for Dove’s firming products, for instance, grew from 7.4% to 13.5% in the six biggest markets (the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain), far exceeding the marketers’ expectations. In fact, sales in the U.K. showed an immediate increase of 700%, according to CMO magazine. And the campaign was awarded the Grand Effie at the 2006 EFFIE Awards.
Here again, the brand became demand. Online interaction became online and offline transaction - creating a kind of symbiotic cycle that builds sales while perpetually reinforcing both.
In my book BRANDING UNBOUND, I describe branding as the means by which a company creates a compelling consumer experience that differentiates its offerings from the competition, creates an emotional bond with consumers, and/or generates sales.
As Lenovo and, certainly, Unilever, have both discovered, differentiation, emotional bonds and increased sales often lead from one to the other and back again.
Indeed, sometimes they’re the very same thing.
Rick Mathieson is an award-winning writer, author, speaker and frequent media commentator on the converging worlds of marketing, media and technology. Visit Rick’s site.
-- Guest Blogger
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